In plain words: Three top AI chatbots were tested on factual questions while varying the user's English skill, education, and country. Wrong answers and refusals came more often for users with weaker English, less education, or from outside the US, leaving the most vulnerable users worst served.
Abstract · LLM Targeted Underperformance Disproportionately Impacts Vulnerable Users
While state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on many tasks, there has been extensive research on undesirable model behavior such as hallucinations and bias. In this work, we investigate how the quality of LLM responses changes in terms of information accuracy, truthfulness, and refusals depending on three user traits: English proficiency, education level, and country of origin. We present extensive experimentation on three state-of-the-art LLMs and two different datasets targeting truthfulness and factuality. Our findings suggest that undesirable behaviors in state-of-the-art LLMs occur disproportionately more for users with lower English proficiency, of lower education status, and originating from outside the US, rendering these models unreliable sources of information towards their most vulnerable users.
Elinor Poole-Dayan, Deb Roy, Jad Kabbara
arXiv:2406.17737 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Jun 25, 2024 · updated Nov 6, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · Paper accepted at AAAI 2026
Even if you're trying and willing to learn as a less skilled user, it will be harder to gain knowledge from a LLM. A book is the same for all readers…